Harold Pinter's surprise 75th birthday present

Harold Pinter was yesterday awarded the Nobel prize for literature, which carries a cheque for $1.3m (£741,500). The Swedish academy hailed Pinter as 'the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th-century'. Though feted in the UK, the award has angered the political right in America.

The prize has gone to a writer who not only does his own thing so well, but who has changed the way that many writers who followed him write for the stage. In all plays information flows from the stage to the audience, and Harold shows, as nobody else has shown, that the flow is not straightforward - you can't always believe everything people say, and Harold has shown how what is true in life should be true in art which reflects life. Everybody found him difficult in 1958, the year of The Birthday Party, two years later the same people were laughing loudly at The Caretaker in the West End. He took the theatre to a place where it hadn't really been and then he took the audience to that place.

Christopher Hitchens

The award to someone who gave up literature for politics decades ago, and whose politics are primitive and hysterically anti-American and pro-dictatorial, is part of the almost complete degradation of the Nobel racket.

Corin Redgrave

I can't think of a better candidate and I can't think of a better winner. It is truly a great day for the prize and for all the values that Harold stands for. He stands for justice. He stands against exploitation and the impoverishment of people for the sake of quick and dubious profits.

Roger Kimball, editor of the American magazine The New Criterion

The Nobel committee has for some time demonstrated that its prizes are ridiculous but the award going to Harold Pinter is not only ridiculous but repellent. His anti-American rantings have been saved from being merely outrageous by their insanity. He can't take any public platform without a mad raving about the evils of the American empire - although he can't make up his mind if George Bush is a moron or a mad genius. The essence of Pinter's drama is adolescent Samuel Beckett - it's warmed-over and second-hand.

Michael Colgan, artistic director, the Gate Theatre, Dublin

There's a feeling among some of us in the theatre who think that he's an extraordinary man that he's not always valued. We think he's unjustifiably neglected. Pinter doesn't write things with an ulterior motive. When Pinter wrote short plays he was vilified. He's a writer of absolute rare integrity. That type of courage means that he has gone unrewarded. Now the Nobel prize comes and gives it to Harold Pinter. The Swedes got it right.

Michael Frayn

I am delighted. He is a courageous man with a generous heart, who has repeatedly stood up for the persecuted. I particularly admired his going to Turkey and speaking out in the country for writers who have been imprisoned there, and he has been consistent and resolute in criticism of US imperialism. I've also been touched by the generosity of his response to the work of fellow dramatists.